Adding things is satisfying. Another label. Another animation. A sentence explaining the sentence above it.
Removing things feels suspiciously like doing less work. Until the page gets better.
This site has had plenty of both. The current projects page acquired an introductory paragraph, a date, a highlight count, status labels, lists of notes, and a closing remark about having too many tabs open. Individually, most of those things sounded reasonable. Together, they were a lot of ceremony before the actual projects.
The page became clearer when much of that disappeared.
Turn a few tracks off
Rick Rubin describes a similar problem in music. In his conversation with Lex Fridman, he talks about how adding layers to make a recording bigger can have the opposite effect:
“sometimes the more things you add, the smaller it gets.”
— Rick Rubin, interview transcript, around 31:51
He describes narrowing an album of 25 recorded songs down to five or six indispensable tracks, even if the original target was ten. Then consider what deserves to come back. In the same discussion:
“And you might find that there’s nothing you need to add.”
— Rick Rubin, interview transcript, around 33:16
That is a useful editing experiment for a website. Take away the supporting material for a moment. Can the main thing stand up? What actually becomes harder to understand?
A paragraph can be perfectly well written and still be the fourth explanation of something that only needed one.
Fewer words, more information
The planets on this site revealed the other half of the problem. A few small spheres looked nice, but didn’t make it clear that there were projects to open. Removing everything would have made that worse.
The fix was to give each planet a card with a name, a short description, and an invitation to explore. That added useful information. The separate panel that appeared below the solar system then felt disconnected, so the details moved into the card itself.
The goal was a shorter path from seeing something to understanding it. Sometimes that meant deleting a label. Sometimes it meant adding a better one.
That distinction matters. A tiny interface that needs an explanation is still asking someone to do extra work. The explanation has simply escaped the layout.
Keep the personality
There is still a virtual puppy. The word “now” still has an animated green highlight. The terminal still exists despite the continued availability of links.
Those things give the site some character. They can stay without requiring three paragraphs about why they are there.
When editing a page, try hiding one piece at a time. Read what remains. See whether anything useful went missing. If the page feels calmer and says the same thing, that is a fairly good result.
And if it becomes harder to use, put the piece back. This is editing, not a contest to own the fewest pixels.
The puppy stays. The paragraph explaining the puppy can probably be shorter.